


Death is a friend of ours (and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home)

by merle_p



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Drawing, Established Relationship, Healing, Living Together, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Season/Series 02, Relationship Negotiation, Very Mild Gore, Yuletide, Zombie Vanilla Sex Is Not So Vanilla For Everyone Else, discussion of religion, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 20:07:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2786039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merle_p/pseuds/merle_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kieren and Simon, in the between, together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death is a friend of ours (and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [th_esaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/gifts).



> Hello th_esaurus, your yuletide writer wishes you happy holidays and a wonderful new year! Thank you for the lovely prompts - hope you like this!
> 
> The title is a quote by Francis Bacon from his "An Essay on Death"

Time has become an unknown variable. Kieren didn't realize it until he woke up in Norfolk, how much the living's lives are determined by the question, the fear, of how much time in life they have left. Even being as young as he was, he wasn't immune to it, kept being pulled into the vicious circle of worries: His father's stern "You should start thinking about your future," his mother's wistful "When I was young …," his own thoughts of "I don't want to be stuck in Roarton forever," and sometimes, when he was watching Rick put his jumper back on with guilty fingers and averted eyes, the desperate doubt of: "Is it always going to feel like this?"

The suicide was supposed to put a stop to this, was supposed to halt time, interrupt the fear of the future and the regrets about the past. Then he woke up, and in between the horrifying flashbacks and the paralyzing self-hate, there was the terrible realization that time had started moving again. 

Except that it doesn't seem to follow a linear progression any longer. Things still happen, things do change, but there is no clear goal, no predictable ending, no sense of wasted days or the panic of running out of time. It's as if his subconscious knows that his body is not aging, not really healing nor decomposing, and puts a halt to any pursuit of long-term plans. Kieren knows he could – should – think about finding another job, maybe look at his art school applications again, but something is holding him back, something he can't quite put his finger on. It's like he is waiting for something, but he doesn't know what it is. It's like he is holding his breath – and when you are dead, you can hold your breath for a very long time. 

 

Simon leans over on the sofa, his volume of Yeats abandoned in his lap. He reaches for Kieren's face, rubs a gentle finger across his upper lip. It comes away black.  


He must have had a nosebleed again. He hadn't even noticed.

"How do you feel?" Simon asks, concern tinging his voice. Kieren shrugs. 

"Fine," he says. "I feel fine." He pauses. "My hands keep shaking," he adds reluctantly. 

"I noticed," Simon nods. Of course he did. There is little about Kieren Simon doesn't notice these days. 

"What do you think is going to happen to us?" Kieren asks, a bit abruptly. It's the first time they are actually talking about this, although Kieren isn't entirely sure why they have been avoiding the topic so diligently, or what made him say the words out loud this time. "Are we just going to come back to life, like Amy did?"

Simon frowns, as if the prospect isn't a particularly happy one. "I don't know," he says, looking down. His fingers are playing with his book, flipping the same page over and back again. "If there have been other cases like her, it's not been made public, and there is zero information about it online. Maybe she really was an exception. Maybe we'll just be stuck like this."

"Like this?" Kieren repeats, his eyes following the movement of Simon's hands across the pages of the book: the permanent black tinge around the nail beds set against the ashen paleness of his fingers, like the black of the print against the white page. 

Simon sighs, his fingers still. "Like we are now. The Neurotriptyline working to bring us back to life, and our bodies resisting the change."

"But …" Kieren looks up, into Simon's sombre eyes. "So what would happen to us? If we don't. Become fully alive again. Are we going get older at all? Are we going to be … immortal?"

The thought is horrifying, even more so because he doesn't know why it never occurred to him before. Simon must hear some of the panic in his voice, because he tilts his head and gives Kieren a searching look. 

"You'd rather be alive again?" he asks, his voice careful, as if he is dreading Kieren's response. 

Kieren stares at him in surprise. "You wouldn't?" he asks, but as he is speaking, he directs the question at himself in his mind, and finds that he isn't entirely sure of the answer.

Simon looks straight back at him, but there is something sad and defiant in his expression. "I'm happier now," he quietly says, and closes the book in his lap. His hand comes to rest on Kieren's leg for a moment, a vague, but comforting weight, then he shifts forward to place the book on the coffee table and gets to his feet. 

Kieren follows him with his eyes, watches him disappear into the bedroom, then returns to his drawing, a sketch of Amy in pink and blue crayon. She is twirling in circles on the page, her arms raised high, her petticoats flying – she is almost right, almost, but something is still missing, and his conversation with Simon keeps turning in his head, like Amy's pirouettes on paper. 

Eventually Kieren sets the sketchbook aside with a sigh, and eyes the closed bedroom door. 

 

When Kieren first met Simon, he assumed that Simon's belief in all that mythical rubbish – the First Risen as messiah of the undead, the promise of a Second Rising and all that entailed, from gloomy bible quotes to Blue Oblivion – was just a delusion the Undead Prophet had planted in his head. The obnoxious sermons, on the other hand, the preaching and lecturing that used to make him want to grab Simon by the shoulders and shake him hard: that, he filed away as annoying character trait, and later he resigned himself to thinking of it as an unchangeable part of who Simon was, to be accepted and embraced with all the rest. 

To his astonishment, he realizes now that he needs to re-evaluate. 

Simon is not preaching much anymore. With his faith in the prophet, he also seems to have lost all the self-assurance, the air of casual superiority. These days, he is quiet and careful, with a twist of dark, self-deprecating humour, the way he only used to be when they were alone, when Kieren managed to take him by surprise and got him to drop his mask.  


Kieren is honest enough with himself to admit the relief he felt when he first became aware of the change. Now he also has to admit that it never even occurred to him that when Simon stopped preaching, he might not stop praying as well. 

 

"You are praying," Kieren says slowly. 

Simon abruptly falls silent, his head shoots up. He looks lost, down on one knee at the foot of the bed, and a little bit guilty as well, as if he got caught doing something forbidden. Kieren isn't quite sure that he hasn't. 

"Why do you still pray?" he asks.

Simon looks up at him. "I just do," he says, uncomfortable and heavy. His lips seem to resist his efforts to shape the words. 

"I thought you were done with the Undead Prophet," Kieren says, and he can't help the reproachful tone that creeps into his voice. 

Simon's eyes widen. "I am," he replies forcefully. "This has nothing to do with the ULA."

"Okay," Kieren says slowly. It's not that he doesn't believe Simon, has no reason not to, these days. Still, something about seeing him kneel like this, head bent over his folded hands, stirs unpleasant resentment in Kieren's chest. Only he doesn't know what to do with it.

"I'm going over to my parents' for lunch," he finally says. Simon frowns. 

"You don't eat lunch," he says, and there are all kinds of complicated things implied in that sentence. Kieren doesn't feel ready to sort them out. 

"I'm going to go watch my family eat lunch," he rephrases, a bit spitefully, and then feels guilty as he watches Simon's face fall at his words. 

He turns around, but pauses in the doorway, one hand on the handle. "I'll be back in a bit."

When he doesn't receive an answer, he looks back over his shoulder. Simon hasn't moved from his position on the floor, but he has once again lowered his head. 

 

His mother looks startled and a bit worried when she opens the door at his knock. He cannot blame her: He hardly shows up at mealtimes anymore, a practice that has done wonders for his relationship with his family, once they'd got used to it. Popping over at eleven on a Wednesday morning is unusual enough to warrant a raised brow, but Sue doesn't ask. 

"I'm still cooking," she simply says, already retreating into the kitchen, "and your father is not yet back from work. You'll have to occupy yourself for a bit."

Kieren goes upstairs to knock on Jem's door, but realizes as he is waiting for an answer that she'll likely still be in school. He ends up in his old room instead. He sits on the bed, staring blankly at the walls, and several pairs of eyes stare back at him evenly from the different paintings hung around the room. The faces are dear, and familiar in an absolute way – he looks at one and recalls drawing the lines around the eyes, remembers coaxing the face into being with careful dabs and broad strokes. And still, it surprises him sometimes: the way he can look at the images he created himself and see something he wasn't at all aware of before. 

Rick looks distant these days, proud and closed-off, and though Kieren clearly remembers loving him, it somehow seems very far away. Amy's smile is cheerfully mischievous, but there is a resigned sadness in her gaze that Kieren has never fully noticed before. Jem seems sullen and defiant – this one, he painted shortly after he came back – but lingering in her eyes, the tilt of her head, are still traces of the girl, the little sister he remembers from before. 

And Simon – Simon looks strikingly handsome, fiercely determined. And utterly, devastatingly lonely. 

Kieren's mind wanders back to the day his parents put him under house arrest: he remembers sitting on his bed as he does now, staring at the drawing of Simon he had pinned to the board over his desk, remembers how alone he had felt and abandoned, and how much he had wanted Simon to be there for him. 

He gets up from the bed and crosses the room, runs a gentle index finger over Simon's eyebrows, as if to smooth out the small frown on his forehead that is dragging them down. Then he picks up his coat from the bed and makes his way down the stairs. 

"Mum?" he says, walking into the kitchen, and Sue looks up from stirring the soup. "Mum, I think I'm going to go back to the bungalow after all." 

She doesn't seem disappointed, or even really surprised. "Good," she says. "I'd hate to think that you two are having a row."

Kieren stares. "I'm sorry?"

His mother gives him a small, private smile. "You think I don't recognize your moping face?" she asks. "I realize that I haven't always been good at understanding you lately, but I do know you a little bit."

"So you … are okay with this?" he asks, and wonders if he is mad for raising this question now, after all these months. It's not even like it would change anything, no matter what the answer is going to be. 

His mother sighs. "I admit I had my doubts about Simon," she says slowly. "Not because of anything he did, mind – he's been nothing but lovely, and I'll never forget that he saved your life. Only … Because of his age, because of the crowd he used to run with. Because –" she pauses, shrugs awkwardly. "I know it's not right, but maybe deep down, part of me was still hoping you'd meet a nice girl, you know? But," she continues, more steadily now, "but Kieren, love, I've never seen you so – at peace with yourself since you were ten and we got you a set of paints for your birthday. And that is enough." She smiles. 

"It is more than enough."

 

For the first weeks after Kieren moves into the bungalow, it doesn't feel like his place at all. His mum refuses to turn his old room into a sewing room: "I didn't change it when I thought you were dead," she says, "I'm not going to change it when you're just down the street," and there is really not much he can say to that. So what little furniture he has stays at his parents' place, and everything he takes with him, clothes, books and CDs, brushes and paints, fits into the one suitcase he had planned to travel to Paris with. 

So it's him moving into Simon's place, except it's not really Simon's either: When Simon came to Roarton, he carried even less than what Kieren owns, and he hasn't done much shopping since. Knowing what to look for, Kieren can see traces of Simon all over the house: a volume of poetry in the living room, ingredients for Neurotriptyline in the kitchen, some pictures of his parents hidden in a drawer, and a considerable number of hideous jumpers in the wardrobe. 

To anyone else, however, the house still looks very much like Amy's, although at least half of what seems to be Amy's belonged to her grandmother before. 

Kieren thinks that really, he is living in Simon's space who is living in Amy's space who was living in her gran's space, and he thinks it should probably bother him. 

Rather, he finds that he quite likes it that way: because it feels less permanent, like they haven't fully settled down. 

It's not that he has doubts about moving in with Simon. It made sense, in a purely practical way: there is no pretend-eating, no careful questions about the potency of home-brewed Neurotriptyline, and no worried looks when Kieren starts shaking without feeling cold. But it also feels right, more right maybe than anything he has done since he crawled out of his coffin that fateful night, to sleep next to Simon every night, and to wake up with him. 

Everything else seems uncertain at best: Their status in Roarton, now that resentment toward the undead is only simmering under the surface; living in Amy's bungalow, with Philip still out there looking for her; even being undead seems not quite so permanent since black clotted blood has begun to drip from Simon's nose and Kieren's eyes are gradually changing color. 

Beyond all this, however, there is nothing temporary about his feelings for Simon.

 

When Kieren gets back to the bungalow, Simon is hoovering the living room. It's not that unusual an image. Simon likes things to be tidy: Kieren figured that out quickly after they got into a bit of a row over clothes strewn across the bedroom floor, although he suspects that Simon's insistence on keeping the bungalow as clean as he does is more about him making sure that it's ready for Amy's return. It's as if Simon thinks that as long as he keeps the flat in shape for her, there is still hope that she will come back. 

Kieren has no intention to dissuade him from that notion. 

But he knows for a fact that Simon vacuumed the floors two days ago, and even Simon isn't that obsessive. Over the noise of the hoover, Simon doesn't hear him enter, and so Kieren stays in the doorway watching him until Simon looks up. When he notices Kieren, he switches off the vacuum cleaner and gestures at the floor. 

"I broke a vase," he says awkwardly, and Kieren takes this to mean that it wasn't exactly an accident. He pictures Simon smashing it, in anger or frustration. 

"I'm sorry," he says, and "I'm sorry," says Simon, at the same time. They look at each other and smile weakly. 

"You know, I never even had a proper boyfriend," Kieren says. He feels terribly young and inexperienced. "I've never lived with anyone but my family before." 

Simon gives him a lopsided smile. "I have," he says dryly. "It was a disaster." 

"What happened?" Kieren asks, wondering as he is speaking if he even wants to know. But no, he does. Some of the undead may be convinced that the best thing about the rising is that it offered a fresh start, a clean slate, but Kieren is not one of them. Who they were before still matters. 

Simon shrugs and begins to wind up the power cord. "We were both addicts," he says, as if it's as simple as that. Kieren thinks maybe it is, and is surprised at how sad that makes him feel. 

He walks over to the sofa, careful to check for remaining shards – it's not as if they would hurt him, but it's such a pain to clean up the black stuff that would leak out of the cut – and pats the seat next to him once he's settled down. Simon only hesitates for a second before he abandons the vacuum cleaner and comes to sit at his side. Kieren curls into him, puts his head against Simon's chest, wraps his arms around his waist. Simon rests his hand on Kieren's neck, and even if Kieren can't really feel the touch of his fingers on his skin, the weight of his palm is a comforting pressure against his spine. 

"I can stop, if it bothers you," Simon says. Kieren marvels, once again, at how Simon can resist authority so vehemently in one way, but leave himself at Kieren's mercy so completely. He still doesn't understand what he did to inspire this absolute faith. Sometimes, he thinks, he hopes, he wants it to be because Simon knows he won't abuse his trust. Most days, he simply hopes it will pass. He is quite content with being Simon's boyfriend. He is not cut out to be anyone's saviour. 

"No, don't," he sighs against Simon's chest. "This is not – I just want to understand," he says. "Since we got back, all that stuff, religion, whatever people believed in, it's just made things worse. Vicar Oddie, Maxine Martin …"

He trails off and doesn't say that it was also Simon's faith in the prophet that once almost made him kill Kieren. From the way Simon's hand stills against the curve of his neck, he has still heard it loud and clear. 

"My mum was religious," Simon finally says, and Kieren closes his eyes. The story of Simon's mother he got to hear some weeks ago, tangled up in a choked confession about the prophet's plans for Kieren, and Simon's role in that plan. 

"I didn't want anything to do with it," Simon continues after a while. "She'd always tell me that she'd pray for my soul." He laughs wryly. "I hated it."

"And now?" Kieren asks. He shifts back a little so that he can look Simon in the eyes. 

"I just need there to be a reason," Simon says, a bit desperately. 

"A reason for what?" Kieren asks, and Simon looks down. 

"Everything that's happened to me," he says. "Why did I have to rise? Why did I have to go to my parents' place when I woke –" he breaks off. "Why did I have to be the first one to respond to the treatment? Why did the prophet speak to me at Norfolk?" For a moment, he looks at Kieren imploringly, as if he hopes that Kieren actually has an answer. Then he shrugs, awkwardly. 

"First I thought it was because I was chosen," he says darkly. "Then I thought it was a punishment. But now I know that cannot be right, either."

"Why?" Kieren asks, and Simon smiles and raises an arm to cup Kieren's face in his hand. 

"Because if this was God's idea of a punishment, I never would have met you."

It's not the first time Simon says something astonishing like this, but Kieren still doesn't know how to answer. So he leans in and kisses him instead, and the way he responds tells Kieren that Simon understands what he's trying to say anyway. 

 

Sex is different now he is dead. Not that he had all that much sex before his suicide, mind: Most girls in school hadn't looked at him twice, even if he had been interested; and there had been no other boys besides Rick. With Rick, there had been awkward fumbling, tossing each other off in the semi-darkness of his bedroom (never at Rick's, Christ, no), and the occasional blowjob in the cave, where no one would be able to hear when they got loud. They never went further than that, never even got completely naked together, and really, one of the things Kieren regretted most about his previous life was that he'd never had proper sex before he died. 

He does remember the want, though, the purely physical need – remembers waking up hard every morning, remembers bringing himself off, still in bed, and again in the shower, remembers how it felt when Rick would touch him, how little it took to get him off, his skin oversensitive, as if the feeling of Rick's breath on his neck would be enough to send him over the edge. 

There is nothing of that now. There is no physical urge, no desperate pressure, no heat pooling in his groin at a touch, a word, a breath. 

Instead, it is as if the physical desire, the bodily need, is replaced by an emotional hunger, a deeply-rooted craving, not unlike the hunger he remembers feeling after the rising, and yet entirely different: it's a hunger for closeness, a desire to feel Simon, to crawl into him, to drown himself in him. It's overwhelming and frightening, and yet he doesn't want to let it go. 

Kieren is never quite sure if the way he feels comes from being undead, or from being in love. It does occur to him occasionally that it's a bit ironic that he died in an attempt to numb the feelings he now so desperately craves – but that's usually as far as he gets before his mind is swept away by the onslaught of emotion when he feels Simon's gaze on him, heated and dark.

 

Simon is on his belly now, stretched out naked on the sheets. Looking at him like this always makes desire flare in Kieren's chest: He is beautiful, the broad shoulders, the shoulder blades spreading like wings, the soft curve of his arse. He is also vulnerable like this, and the knowledge that Simon trusts him enough to present his back, to bare his spine to him, has him stare in awe every time. 

Kieren touches the edge of the wound, high up, right below his neck, and Simon flinches – but not with pain, Kieren knows that now. For all that their skin doesn't react much to sensation, it is not as if their bodies cannot feel: they just have to go deep enough. This, the laceration that bears witness to the unspeakable horrors Simon has seen, this is also where he's most sensitive, where the nerve endings lay bare, and when Kieren runs his fingers along the cut, following the curve of his back, he knows Simon can feel every touch. 

By the time he reaches the small of his back, Simon is shivering uncontrollably. "Christ, Kieren," he says, already sounding so wrecked, so desperate, and then Kieren puts his mouth to the cut and Simon jerks helplessly on the bed. 

Kieren is shaking too. He licks along Simon's spine, can feel the bone under his tongue in some places, and Simon groans and arches into the touch. 

The first time he did this, they both freaked out at their own audacity. It wasn't the act itself that scared them – there is nothing revolting about the cuts and scars that mark them all – but rather the realization just how much they both liked it, how much they wanted to do it, over and over again. 

Kieren rests his face against the curve of Simon's arse, petting his sides senselessly as if he's calming down a shying horse. Eventually, Simon moves, turns over onto his back, forcing Kieren to sit back on his heels. Simon looks up at him then, for a long moment, then reaches out to run a finger over Kieren's mouth. 

"What do you want, Kieren?" he asks, and Kieren has to close his eyes. Simon always says that, every time, and Kieren – still doesn't feel entirely comfortable demanding, still doesn't know what to do with the idea that everything he could ask for, Simon is willing to give. It's too much, it's far too much, and yet –

He opens his eyes. "I want you to put your fingers in me," he says, voice rough, and Simon looks at him for a moment longer, before he raises up in one fluid motion and pushes Kieren down against the bed. 

 

The phone call, when it finally comes on that grey afternoon in March, Shirley's voice tinny over the line, interrupts the constant ebb and flow of days. Shirley says: "He found her, Kieren," and for a moment, time jams, like a clockwork put to a stuttering halt by an errant wrench, then jolts and starts running again. Nothing is different, Kieren muses, as he puts down the receiver and looks into Simon's expectant, wary face, but he knows that after today, things are not going to stay the same. 

From the way Simon looks when he hears what happened, he knows it too: torn between his joy that Amy is alive, and his fear that soon, he might be as well. He comes easily when Kieren opens his arms for an embrace, holds onto him with desperate strength, and when eventually he withdraws and disappears into the bedroom, Kieren doesn't stop him. He knows Simon won't go far. 

After he calls his parents to tell them the good news, he stands in the hallway a moment longer, his hand still on the phone, and simply listens. The house is silent, the bedroom door closed. Eventually, Kieren picks up the pencil they keep next to the phone, and goes to fetch his sketchbook from the living room table. 

Simon raises his head from his folded hands as Kieren enters the bedroom, apprehension in his eyes, and a silent question. Kieren just smiles and puts a finger against his lips, and after a moment, Simon relaxes – his shoulders slump, his head falls forward, leaving his neck exposed, the ridge of his cervical vertebrae just barely visible as they disappear underneath his collar. 

Kieren settles on the bed, as silently as he can, and picks up his pencil. He waits. Eventually, Simon starts speaking quietly, verses like the flow of a river over stone, and maybe Kieren could even understand what he is saying if he tried. Instead, he lets Simon's voice wash over him, not listening to the words, just to the familiar cadence of the sound. 

He begins to draw. Traces the line of Simon's head, neck, down his spine, moving the pen with gentle affection, almost as if he was tracing the lines on Simon's skin, not on paper. He draws the collar of his shirt, gets distracted by the way Simon's hair curls up a bit in his neck, by the broad expanse of his muscular back. 

He gets so lost in his work that it takes him a while to realize Simon has stopped praying and is watching him instead. He is still kneeling at the foot of the bed, but he has turned around, his arms now resting on the covers, his chin propped on his arms. He is smiling. 

Kieren looks at his drawing one more time, not-quite reluctant to let it go; then he closes the sketchbook and carefully sets it down on the nightstand, aware that Simon is tracking the movement with his eyes. 

The moment his hands are free, Simon moves, climbs onto the bed and crawls toward him, claims his mouth in a kiss that neither of them is in a hurry to end. Eventually though, they settle down against the bed, wrapped around and curled into each other. Simon's fingers are drawing patterns on Kieren's forearm, and if Kieren focuses on it, he thinks he can almost feel a tingle following the touch. 

"If Amy is coming back," he finally says hesitantly, because he isn't sure yet what that means, "we will need to find another place to stay."

Simon nods thoughtfully. "We should probably start looking. Do you want to stay in Roarton?"

Kieren looks at him with surprise. He hadn't given the question another thought since their conversation the day of Amy's funeral, just assumed that this was where he was supposed to be. But now that things are changing –

"I don't know," he says slowly, testing it out. "We should talk about it. I suppose if it's to be something a bit more permanent …" 

"Of course it is," Simon says seriously, sounding appalled at the idea that it could be anything but, and leans in to kiss him again, his arms around Kieren's neck, holding him close. 

Kieren kisses him back, and like a breath he's been holding for too long, a weight suddenly seems to fall off of him, leaving him feeling light and miraculously carefree. 

Time has started moving again. 

For the first time in forever, his future actually looks hopeful.


End file.
